The BBC’s deputy director of news and current affairs, Fran Unsworth, is interviewed, (if that’s the word) by Radio 4’s verbose James Naughtie, about Corporation policy on the Islamic State beheading story.

Curiously, he didn’t ask about the BBC’s latest scandal – their coverage of police searching the home of Sir Cliff Richard.

What a pity. Miss Unsworth authorised the filming by helicopter, the most controversial aspect of this grubby affair.

Silent: While interviewing deputy director of news and current affairs Fran Unsworth, James Naughtie (left) did not ask about the BBC coverage of police searching the home of Cliff Richard (right)

RE: Naughtie, 63 – what’s his BBC status these days? Occasionally he broadcasts for the Today show from Scotland. Additionally he talks on programmes about books and the Proms and takes himself overseas on reporting assignments. A BBC source says: ‘They’re trying to ease Jim out of Today altogether.’ That would be a shame. For some, his emollient approach is a restful respite from the searing inquisitions of Radio 4’s Robespierre, John Humphrys.

The death, at 71, of writer Candida Lycett Green – the daughter of the late poet-laureate Sir John Betjeman – will sadden the Queen. Candida knew the monarch and believed she was betrayed in 1992, when the Prime Minister at the time, John Major, signed the Maastricht Treaty. This turned Her Majesty into an EU citizen and violated her Coronation Oath to ‘govern my people … according to their respective laws and customs’.

Movie legend Kirk Douglas, 97, talks about Lauren Bacall, who died aged 89 last week: ‘I met Betty (Lauren) when she was 17 and I was 24. I was on my own in New York with meagre funds. That winter, Betty saw me shivering in my thin overcoat. She didn’t say anything, but talked her uncle into giving me one of his two thick coats. I wore it for three years.’

Opening next week in Juvenalia – a one- man show at London’s St James’s Theatre about poet-satirist Juvenal – Simon Callow, 65, says the outspoken Roman, known for his ‘wrathful scorn towards all representatives of social deviance’, was not unlike his own father. He reveals how Anglo-French businessman Neil Callow ‘lived in Africa where he was once a sort of God, but became a very ordinary person after the colonial revolution’. He adds: ‘He was so angry he turned to the bottle, which eventually killed him.’ Callow has previously confided that his late Papa ‘had a passion for tall, blonde women’ and ‘my father died the day I started acting – a coincidence, I hope’. Trashing our parents isn’t attractive, but it obviously gets Callow’s creative juices flowing.